A Survey of Spam Detection Methods on Twitter

Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms that has 313 million monthly active users which post 500 million tweets per day. This popularity attracts the attention of spammers who use Twitter for their malicious aims such as phishing legitimate users or spreading malicious software and advertises through URLs shared within tweets, aggressively follow/unfollow legitimate users and hijack trending topics to attract their attention, propagating pornography. In August of 2014, Twitter revealed that 8.5% of its monthly active users which equals approximately 23 million users have automatically contacted their servers for regular updates. Thus, detecting and filtering spammers from legitimate users are mandatory in order to provide a spam-free environment in Twitter. In this paper, features of Twitter spam detection presented with discussing their effectiveness. Also, Twitter spam detection methods are categorized and discussed with their pros and cons. The outdated features of Twitter which are commonly used by Twitter spam detection approaches are highlighted. Some new features of Twitter which, to the best of our knowledge, have not been mentioned by any other works are also presented. Keywords—Twitter spam; spam detection; spam filtering;